Theatre review: This Lime Tree Bower gives good monologue

Theatre review: This Lime Tree Bower gives good monologue

The Irish are great soliloquisers. Or is the word soliloquist? It must be, as spellcheck hasn’t given me a hard time for using it.

Anyway, they give great monologue. Even a comparatively conventional play like Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane has a key part of its story told to us by one character alone on the stage, supposedly composing a letter.

Currently in Toronto there are two plays in each of which a trio of Dubliners line up to give us their separate, alternating portions of what turns out to be a single tale: Terminus by Mark O’Rowe and now This Lime Tree Bower by the foremost exponent of the genre, Conor McPherson.

He isn’t quite its founding father. That would be Brian Friel whose Faith Healer, in which each of the speeches seems to go on for ever, may be the most rigorously classical example of the form. McPherson, though, wrote The Weir, which initially seems to be no more than an assortment of anecdotes, given naturalistic cover by being swapped in a bar-room, but which turns out to be both unified and moving; it’s a long shaggy-dog story composed of shorter shaggy-pup stories.

The Lime Tree Bower doesn’t bother with that kind of naturalistic cover. It gives us the convention at its purest: three men, seated side by side, talking always to us, never to one another.

The title derives, rather obscurely (even more obscurely here, since it’s never mentioned in the program), from a poem by Coleridge: This Lime Tree Bower My Prison. The poet, temporarily incapacitated, sits in a tree and imagines all the fun his friends are having without him. Each of McPhersons three characters is, like everybody, confined in the cell of his own consciousness. Each of them tries, or is obliged, to reach outside it and achieve some degree of empathy with other people. The theatre itself may be a lime tree bower in its own right. We sit there, watching and especially listening, and the longer we do so — in this case, anyway — the more amused, shocked and involved we become. It does take time.

Two of the three are brothers, their unseen father a widowed chip-shop proprietor heavily in debt to an unpleasant local bookie, also unseen though much talked of. Joe, 16 years old, is fixated on a tearaway schoolmate who promises to be his passport to booze, girls, and discos where they don’t fuss about your ID. Frank, his elder sibling, has more specific ambitions, that involve liquidating his dad’s debt by burgling the bookie; followed to its logical conclusion this would be robbing Peter to pay Peter.

The third and oldest man, Ray, is a university lecturer who’s entered their lives by dating their sister. He’s also been falling drunkenly into bed with at least one of his young female students. Bored with his subject, contemptuous of his colleagues, he’s a Hibernian throwback to the English campus novels of Kingsley Amis and, especially, Malcolm Bradbury; instead of the History Man he’s the Philosophy Man. A celebrated 98-year old German philosopher is scheduled to visit, and Ray looks forward to besting him in a hastily arranged Q&A session.

It doesn’t work out like that; Ray having incurred the grandmother of all hangovers, its humiliating results entertainingly described. (Hearing about the booze intake of just about everyone mentioned in this play left me feeling queasy.) His fellow narrators suffer their own disillusion. Frank, having held up the not-quite-ironically named bookie Simple Simon with results beyond his wildest dreams (“you mean there’s a safe”, he doesn’t quite say) finds himself with a stash of cash too dangerous to use.

Joe is shocked by some of his idol’s activities and even more by their aftermath, a turn of events that has him on tenterhooks and us along with him. Ray finds himself driving a rather specialized kind of getaway car. All three characters have epiphanies of some kind. They don’t all seem equally deserved.

In Sarah Dodd’s plain but powerful production, the most accomplished performance is given, unsurprisingly, by the most experienced actor: Gray Powell’s Ray is the consummate faculty-bar Lothario, volubly despising everyone else while silently loathing himself.

The newest player, Anthony MacMahon as Joe starts tentatively, apparently uncertain of both the accent and the acoustics, but settles down into a funny, vulnerable performance, showing himself a young master of agonised suspense.

In between, Matthew Gorman as Frank blurs the edges of both character and text, He is, though, as artistic director of Cart/Horse Theatre, responsible for bringing us the play in the first place, and all credit to him for that.

This Lime Tree Bower runs at the Berkeley Theatre in Toronto until Dec. 22.